Hieroglyphic

Walking down the wall
I see the hieroglyphics of living.
The stone is clear,
barely etched where I began.
The brown stone of a sierra.
Only horizon and empty air.
Artifacts of distance,
where time is swallowed up.
So infancy is a clean place.
A study of lines and diaphanous meanings.

It’s as I go down the wall
that signatures begin.
Strata writes the history of hours
deposited second by second,
with the invisibility of kelp
under a sea of sand.
The soul, dancing through the atoms,
leaving nothing of itself behind.

Then the writing begins.
The pictures.
The storms and battles.
Crevices gashed in the rock.
Vases and buildings,
and finally portraits,
animals,
the starvation of time
as things fall out of its fate.

And I reach a point, still untouched.
Still inviting me to mar its surface
with odysseys and secret codes
and despair.
But light is revealed
only in a pictograph candle.
A flame.

The light that was flame, missing.
And that is what I am becoming.
Fire going out.
Trickling away.
That’s all I was in the beginning,
fire consuming its host.
Life.